Using tax policy to push corporations and their billionaire founders/executives/shareholders to change their behavior might be the more rational strategy. For example, elimination of tax breaks for the fossil fuel sector:
> "The intangible drilling cost deduction (which expenses as opposed to capitalizes certain drilling costs) has been around for over 100 years, and the percentage depletion allowance (15% reduction in gross income of a productive well) has also been around nearly that long. (Forbes)"
This discourages investment in fossil fuels, and of course transferring the tax breaks to the renewable industry would encourage growth in that sector.
Similarly, if we went back to 1960s corporate tax rates (50% top tier), well, corporations avoided those high rates by getting deductions for their massive R&D efforts (see Bell Labs etc.). If we want technological development, encouraging large-scale private sector R&D makes sense (see China's technological development history).
Such policies don't necessarily increase government revenue but they do push corporate behavioral changes and technological development.
I find this discourse incredibly frustrating. I don't like billionaires, and I would prefer they give away their money more rapidly. But they are following that laws that exist just as much as the rest of us. We don't expect people to voluntarily pay higher taxes than required, and that would be a ridiculous way of running a government.
It's stupid to say they are "not paying their taxes", because in fact, as a policy, our government has chosen not to tax them. If people disagree with that policy, they should focus their ire on government, not on billionaires.
It's also ridiculous to say they "don't pay taxes" when in fact they do pay taxes. Bezos has already sold at least $15 billion in Amazon stock over the past 2 years. All taxable. Musk has a $15 billion tax bill that we know is due in 2022.
It's not nothing. People can say that it's not enough, but it's not nothing.
When deciding what is fair in tax, we should perhaps consider not how much is paid in tax, but how much remains after tax. If a middle to low income earner pays $10k in tax, but then has trouble paying their bills, or keeping a roof over their head, have they paid a fair share? When a bilionaire pays $100m in taxes and has billions left to fritter away on going to space or playing with crypto stocks, have they paid a fair share?
If you go by that metric, taxes will never be enough. You could tax a billionaire 99.9% and they'll still have enough. And it wouldn't be fair. And it would destroy the economy in the long term.
In Canada we have a government that constantly talks about climate change yet does nothing. Emissions keep going up. Rich that an article like this comes from the CBC...
Looking at 2019, since 2020 was Weird, emissions per capita appear to be down to 1970s-level https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/canada. Much work to do, but it's still progress.
It has plateaud over a period where Canada’s population increased by almost a third.
Go look at China and India’s if you want something to be indignant about
China's per capita emissions are just over 1/3 of Canada's, and India's per capita emissions are about 1/10th...
So you're patting Canada on the back for a per capita decrease while demonising China and India for a total increase despite their per-capita figures being a fraction of Canada's?
Ok and ? That’s not excuse. I could compare Canada’s emissions to those of Qatar and claim it’s no big deal, or I could compare Chinas emissions to those of Burundi and label them privileged polluters. CO2 is CO2 at the end of the day, and China and India are not doing their part , quite the opposite actually
I suppose it is, but given how much attention Elon Musk's twitter complaining gets, it's useful to re-center the debate. It's not "can $BILLIONAIRE save us from the climate crisis??" - it's: can we bend our governments, systems, and institutions to stop the climate crisis, and serve us all well along the way?
Carnegie built a lot of libraries, but we needed a universal public education system so people could read those books.
Obviously true, but still on balance government-directed spending (especially outside the US, but even here too) is more likely to take long term goals like climate mitigation seriously. And the big picture changes, at the level of serious regulation, can only be done by governments.
If you have $20 to spend and want to do the least damage, give it to the government as tax, basically.
If I remember correctly, US taxpayers (and implicitly everyone who uses USD even via reserve currency basket) paid 2.3 trillion dollars for the war in Afghanistan.
My point is that no amount of tax money would fix problem of irrational spending of it (if you measure rationally from whole humanity benefit vs few elites).
Instead, they should document how they did it, then flaunt it publicly with paid ads and name the politicians and regulations that make it possible. Just keep flaunting until angry people demand that loopholes are closed and laws are changed.
Surely the CBC, a state-run news outlet and beneficiary of over $1B of annual tax dollars, can be trusted to provide a balanced, impartial view of who should be taxed, how much, and where those dollars should be spent.
I see that often we tax the rich in order to pass their money along to lobbyists who take that money and use it for projects that exacerbate the climate crisis. In California, a lot of tax dollars go to dirty energy. Think of Newsom’s ties with PG&E and big oil. It’s a lot like money laundering and muddies what could and should be a fairly simple discussion about how we get our energy. Another example is Biden pushing opec and other nations to pump more oil. Or when he says he is pro-fracking to one group and says he is anti-fracking to another group a few days later. As long as the public votes for more of this, I think our hope must reside outside the political industrial complex. It’s more likely that someone like Musk will solve big problems than the government would using his money. Look at spacex.
What big problem has ever been solved by a billionaire's "philanthropy"?
Government is dysfunctional, but the solution is NOT and never will be billionaires - I for one would prefer not to become a serf - the solution is functional government.
We agree on that then. I’m inclined to think that giving them more money will not make them more functional. It will do the opposite. If a private company gives you worse service do you pay them more? In economics I believe they call that a perverse incentive. Paying them proportional to their failure is the proverbial “throwing good money after bad.” Pretending there’s no such thing as “competition” or “incentives” is not merely ignorance of basic economics, it’s disastrous in a democracy that depends on rational voting.
> giving them more money will not make them more functional.
True, but I disagree with the idea that it'll make them _less_ functional. Relying on billionaires to fix the problem give them more social capital and takes the focus away from fixing government, not to mention one of the things billionaires often do with their money is spend it on undermining the functionality of government (see: Koch brothers).
Government policy and major aspects of the economy are inexorably linked. It doesn't make sense to consider them separately. And I think the structure of production is quite a separate question than billionaires' personal wealth.
Take EV adoption for example—the most successful countries are those with major subsidies for EVs and major regulations on pollution from cars. This simultaneously requires tax money and enriches some billionaires, like Elon Musk.
> "The intangible drilling cost deduction (which expenses as opposed to capitalizes certain drilling costs) has been around for over 100 years, and the percentage depletion allowance (15% reduction in gross income of a productive well) has also been around nearly that long. (Forbes)"
This discourages investment in fossil fuels, and of course transferring the tax breaks to the renewable industry would encourage growth in that sector.
Similarly, if we went back to 1960s corporate tax rates (50% top tier), well, corporations avoided those high rates by getting deductions for their massive R&D efforts (see Bell Labs etc.). If we want technological development, encouraging large-scale private sector R&D makes sense (see China's technological development history).
Such policies don't necessarily increase government revenue but they do push corporate behavioral changes and technological development.